People
Director
Director
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Jalane Schmidt is Director of the Memory Project at the UVA Karsh Institute of Democracy, and Associate Professor of Religious Studies. She teaches courses on race, religion, and social change movements, and is the author of Cachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race & Revolution in Cuba, a study of Cuban national identity, religion, and public events. A scholar-activist in Charlottesville, Virginia, Schmidt plans and leads public history events focused upon Civil War memory, Jim Crow, and local African American history. She cofounded the 2019-2020 Monumental Justice Virginia campaign which successfully lobbied the Virginia General Assembly to overturn a century-old state law which had prohibited localities from removing Confederate statues.
Project Manager
Project Manager
Manager of the Memory Project
Claire Antone Payton is the Manager of the Memory Project at UVA's Karsh Institute of Democarcy. A historian by training, she has a decade of experince researching, teaching about, and living in the Caribbean. She has written extesively on the history of Haiti, cities, and disaster. Previously she was a postdoctoral fellow at UVA's Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. She is currently writing a book on Port-au-Prince during the Duvalier era in Haiti. She also is the creator of the Haiti Memory Project, an archival collection of first person testimonies about the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
Advisory Board
Advisory Board
Professor, Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
A political theorist who studies race, gender, democracy, and literature with a focus on African American political thought. Balfour is especially interested in investigating the relationship between the legacies of slavery and democratic possibilities in the U.S.
Dr. Douglas is Executive Director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and co-chair of the President's Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation.
Dr. Dukes is a mediator and facilitator who founded University & Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE) addressing UVA’s legacy of white supremacy, led community engagement as a member of the design team for UVA’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, served on Charlottesville’s Commission determining the fate of the City’s Confederate statues, and co-leads planning for Central Virginia’s Truth & Transformation Commission.
Professor and Chair, Corcoran Department of History and the Carter G. Goodson Institute
Harold's research and teaching interests include African American social and cultural history, black-nationalist and Pan-African movements, and labor politics.
Associate Professor, Architectural History and Director of UVA's Program in Historic Preservation
Johnston has served as a supervising architect for the Historic American Engineering Record and as an environmental planner for the California State Department of Transportation.
Vice Provost for Academic Outreach and Professor, Architectural History
Nelson is author of Pulpits, Piety, and Power: Anglican Architecture and Material Culture in Colonial South Carolina.
Eto Otitigbe is a polymedia artist who creates sculptures and public installations. He is also the Director of the Turnbull Townhouse Gallery in New York and an Assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Art Department at Brooklyn College. He contributed to the creative expression on the exterior surface of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA.
Fellows & Affiliates
Fellows & Affiliates
Justin G. Reid
Research Associate
Justin G. Reid is a cultural organizer and public historian specializing in rural cultural sustainability, Black cultural rights and memory, and the Long Civil Rights and education history of South Central Virginia. He was raised in Farmville, VA, where his family were litigants in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1964 Griffin decision outlawing local "massive resistance." A half-century later, he directed the opening of the Moton Museum's national award-winning permanent exhibition on his community's activism. As a consultant and strategist, Justin works to advance decolonial place-based learning – recently with the General Assembly to create Virginia's BIPOC Historic Preservation Fund and as a co-founder of William & Mary’s Lemon Project.